I will be purchasing my first DVD burner in the next couple of months. I just had a few questions to ask. I’ve read that if you want +R burning, go with the NEC. If you want -R burning, go with the Pioneer. My DVD player only supports +R but I’m really wanting to get the new 109. My question is, is there really that much of a drop-off between -R and +R with the Pioneer? Should I go with the NEC, and it’s “better” +R performance, since that’s what the player supports?

Also, how are the drives with reading protected discs? I currently have a LiteOn CD burner and haven’t come across a CD that it can’t handle. I just want to have the same freedom with a DVD.

Sing1gniS, as far as the DVD burning +R and -R, I can’t speak for the 108, but with the 3500 you would have the best of both worlds. It burns -R and +R very well. Plus with the NEC3500 you can have “bitsetting” for any +R discs that you burn. That will set the booktype to DVDROM which will make the discs much more compatible.

As for the reader, I would either get a Liteon 167T (which I’m really happy with) or the AOpen DVD Rom drive.(do a search for the model) The Aopen rips DVD’s a little bit faster, but you will be happy with either drive. Both drives are in the $30-$40 range.

It should be noted that the Pioneer doesn’t exactly burn bad DVD+R. That award goes to Lite-On. You can also bitset with the Pioneer DVR-108 using the factory firmware from the Piodata line. The Pioneer is also a better reader than the NEC3500. The NEC is slightly cheaper though.

The Pio108 and NEC 3500 are very similar drives not only by the specs, also the performance and reliability. I have both and prefer the Pio for slightly better burning quality.
As main DVD-ROM I use a LiteOn 167 with speed-hacked fw which lets me use OTF (On-The-Fly) copy/burn at 8x without problems.

an old digitrex d120 set top player that will only play bitset +R or +RW DVDs. It wont play -r or +r without bitset.

A Conia m131 that will play both DVD -r and + r(with or without bitset), but will only play rewritable DVDs if using +rw with bitset. It will not play -rw media, or the +rw media unless bitset, and I can only bitset +rw using my older Ricoh DVD burner. (wish pioneer could bitset +rw media )

I have tried other media brands with identical results. Bitsetting +R rather than using -r seems to be the way to go for for high percentage player compatibilty.